To
discover the future it is not
necessary to be a seer, but it is
absolutely vital to be
unorthodox.

From
Gandhi to
Mandela, from the American
patriot to the Polish shipbuilders,
the makers of revolutions have not
come from the top.

As
human beings, we are the only
organisms that
create for the sheer stupid
pleasure of doing so. Whether it's
laying out a garden, composing a new
tune on the piano, writing a bit of
poetry, manipulating a digital
photo, redecorating a room, or
inventing a new chili recipe ‒ we
are
happiest when we are
creating.
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In a
world of commoditized knowledge, the
returns go to the companies who can
produce non-standard knowledge.

Online
hierarchies are inherently dynamic.
The moment someone stops adding
value to the community, his
influence starts to wane.
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I'm a
capitalist by conviction and
profession. I believe the best
economic system is one that rewards
entrepreneurship and
risk-taking, maximizes customer
choice, uses markets to allocate
scarce resources and minimizes the
regulatory burden on business.

Out
there in some garage is an
entrepreneur who's forging a
bullet with your company's name on
it. You've got one option now – to
shoot first. You've got to
out-innovate the →innovators.

Today, no
leader can afford to be
indifferent to the challenge of
engaging employees in the work of
creating the future. Engagement may
have been optional in the past, but
it's pretty much the whole game
today.

Put
simply, hyper-rational executives
produce hyper-boring products.

Most of us understand that
innovation is enormously
important. It's the only insurance
against irrelevance. It's the only
guarantee of long-term
customer loyalty. It's the only
strategy for out-performing a
dismal economy.

Win
small, win early, win often.

There’s no such thing as
“sustaining” leadership; it must be
reinvented again and again.

The essential insight doesn't come
out of any dirigiste planning
process; it comes form some cocktail
of happenstance,
desire, curiosity, ambition and
need. But at the end of the day,
there has to be a degree of
foresight ‒ a sense of where new
riches lie. So
radical innovation is always one
part fortuity and one part
clearheaded
vision.
>>>

Most of us understand that
innovation is enormously important.
It's the only insurance against
irrelevance. It's the only guarantee
of long-term customer loyalty. It's
the only strategy for out-performing
a dismal economy.

Businesses fail when they
over-invest in what is at the
expense of what could be.

There's a simple, but oft-neglected
lesson here: to sustain success, you
have to be willing to abandon things
that are no longer successful.

The biggest barriers to strategic
renewal are almost always top
management's unexamined beliefs.

Dakota tribal wisdom says that when
you're on a dead horse, the best
strategy is to dismount. Of course,
there are other strategies. You can
change riders. You can get a
committee to study the dead horse.
You can benchmark how other
companies ride dead horses. You can
declare that it's cheaper to feed a
dead horse. You can harness several
dead horses together. But after
you've tried all these things,
you're still going to have to
dismount.
>>>